'You are not really one of us': Old elites tremble at the sight of a new generation - editorial

Veteran N12 news commentator Amnon Abramovich had a special message on Saturday night for all immigrants who came here after the age of 20: You are not really one of us.

Well, that is not exactly what Abramovich said, but – in his strikingly arrogant and galling attack on Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer – this is what he implied.

Abramovich said that since Dermer was not born and raised in Israel, he did not do army service, and he did not imbibe Israeli pop culture from an early age, he was not “deeply Israeli.”

A nice guy? Yes; Cultured? Yes; Polite? Yes. But not an Israeli to the core and, therefore, ill-fitted for a pivotal role in government.

After N12 aired a lengthy segment on Dermer, stressing that he is one of the most important figures in the country, but one whom the public knows little about because he does not appear in the media, Abramovich called into question Dermer’s Israeliness and asked why he did not serve in the army when he made aliyah at age 26.

With a little research, the N12 pundit would have learned that when Dermer made aliyah in the mid-1990s, during the height of the immigration wave from the former Soviet Union, the army was not calling up immigrants in Dermer’s age bracket. Abramovich also conveniently did not mention that Dermer currently has two sons serving in the IDF and a third about to do so.

So, what's the problem?

What was Abramovich’s gripe? That Dermer’s basic life experience was not an Israeli one, that he was not well-versed in Israeli music or in the football scene of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, and that he was unfamiliar with every nook and cranny in the land.

“I don’t think he knows the difference between [singers] Arik Einstein or Zohar Argov, or Shoshana Damari or Chava Alberstein, or who [former soccer stars] Shia Glazer or Nahum Stelmach were, or the difference between [authors] Amos Kenan and Amos Oz... Ron Dermer doesn’t know where Rafah is. If you put him in Nir Oz, he would not know how to get home.”

So much smugness and arrogance in so few words, and also so much to unpack.

Abramovich’s words were an insult not only to Dermer but to all immigrants. It is as if he is saying that immigrants have no right to determine policy in this country because they did not grow up here. Who made Abramovich the arbiter of what it is to be “deeply Israeli?”

The importance of Dermer, already Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s most trusted aide and emissary, is sure to increase with the incoming Trump administration. Dermer was Israel’s ambassador to the US during Trump’s first term and he forged close relationships with the Trump team that will now serve the country well.

Despite this, Dermer rarely makes himself available to the Israeli press. We think this is a mistake, and that the public is entitled to know what an official in such a pivotal role thinks about a wide array of issues. It is not enough for Dermer to appear in the US media; he should also be interviewed in the Hebrew-speaking media.

That Dermer does not make himself available to the press is one of the reasons for a slew of recent critical stories about him.

But there is something else at play here as well: Israeli journalists are not used to ministers who do not seek the limelight, who are not looking to see their names in the headlines, who just want to perform the job given to them as effectively as possible.

Israeli journalists are not used to someone like Dermer who has no political ambitions, and as a result – having felt burned by Israeli journalists in the past – feels now that he simply does not need them or owe them anything. This attitude breeds the type of resentment that is embedded in Abramovich’s rhetoric.

But there is more to Abramovich’s anger at Dermer than just that.

The veteran commentator’s sentiment reflects something deeper: A feeling by the old, secular, entrenched, Ashkenazi elite that their country, and their entitled role in it, is slipping away, and that interlopers – among them right-wing, English-speaking, oftentimes religious immigrants like Dermer – are gaining prominence and eroding their power.

To which we say: Get over it and move on.